Aboriginal business the focus as CBU opens new school building

Cape Breton Post

Published: Sep 06, 2012 at midnight

Updated: Oct 02, 2017 at 11:51 a.m.

SYDNEY — A Cape Breton University research chair has received $1.5 million in federal funding to encourage aboriginal students to pursue business and to conduct research specific to aboriginal business.

Ruth Shannon is joined by her husband, Joe Shannon, namesake of the Shannon School of Business at Cape Breton University, in a ribbon-cutting ceremony to officially open a new building that will house the school. Also shown, left, is Sydney native Lisa Raitt, the federal minister of labour.

Labour Minister Lisa Raitt announced Thursday that Enterprise Cape Breton Corp. and Aboriginal Affairs will provide $750,000 each to the Purdy Crawford Chair in Aboriginal Business at the university.

Keith Brown, who is leading the research chair, said the initiative benefits not only aboriginal people in Cape Breton and Nova Scotia, but aboriginal students from across the country.

Currently, CBU is considered Atlantic Canada’s leader in aboriginal post-secondary education with more than 500 aboriginal graduates holding degrees.

“The huge, huge, issue in front of us is the research and the writing and the development of the first textbook in aboriginal business economic development in Canada,” said Brown. “You might say, ‘Well it’s just a book’. But that book doesn’t exist. If you’re aboriginal in Canada, you will never see yourself in a business text.”

A post-secondary workbook is being developed by a team at CBU and nine aboriginal student interns from across the country. Brown said the book will explain the facts and fallacies that surround aboriginal business today.

“In non-aboriginal Canada, you’re starting up a business and you’re going to look for a loan, you go to a bank and a bank takes collateral,” said Brown. “If you’re aboriginal living on a reserve you cannot get a bank loan because you cannot get collateral.”

Brown praised the business development of Membertou and the community’s move to create their own land management codes that would allow them to participate fully in equity financing and governance.

“That’s a big bold move in Canada, which about less than a dozen of 500 (aboriginal) communities are doing,” said Brown.

Brown said that while some criticize Membertou for increasing its wealth through gambling revenues, what people don’t understand is that Membertou is not unlike other lotto corporations in Atlantic Canada that use gaming revenues to improve public health, roadways and education.

Membertou chief Terry Paul, who sits on the board of CBU’s Shannon School of Business, said a lot of collaboration was needed to make this research chair come to fruition. He said historically, the number of aboriginal students who graduate with a degree in post-secondary education is much lower than the non-aboriginal average.

“Our businesses our growing, we need people to run them, we don’t have too many people who are able to come in and do that,” said Paul.

Paul emphasized the interest in a pre-university program for 30 students at Sydney Academy last year, that received over 200 applicants.

On Thursday, CBU officially opened a $8-million building that now houses the Shannon School of Business.